Having done infertility treatments and injected 10,000ius+ of HCG at a time, I agree that it is a net weight gainer hormone.

The only thing I wonder is if the action of HCG is dose dependent. The doses used in the diet are pretty small from what I understand.

F

The dose in the diets is very small. The principal behind it is that when pregnant, if you do not take in enough fuel, your body will release stored fat to be sure the body is nourished. So, taking hcg prevents your body from experiencing starvation.

I was curious about how much hcg they use in fertility treatments. It's huge compared to what we use: 125 - 200 iu daily. The bodybuilders use big doses of hcg but it has to do with coming off steroids... I guess they get too much estrogen and the hcg does something about that.

How often do you have to take the 10,000 iu?

My own anecdote is that HCG is working well for me where VLC didn't. Maintaining a 15 pound loss so far. I seem to be able to eat more calories now, post-hcg, than before and maintain.

Check out the third study I posted.

VLC works on the same principle as any other low carb diets: Carbohydrate restriction. The studies on HCG say it works on the same principle as any other semi-starvation diet: Caloric restriction. Your success is not due to HCG.

You are successful, there's no doubt about it. But make sure you credit the right actor.

You can all rationalize forever about why the HCG diet works but the fact is that the HCG diet is no different from any old semi-starvation diet. If the HCG diet works better than plain old semi-starvation, then blame it on the ceremony of injecting stuff every day (I'm doing something different this time around), or your own self-hypnosis (I believe, I believe, I believe), or whatever but you can't blame it on HCG itself.

When somebody comes in here and tells us that they lost weight because they cut calories, we straighten them out by explaining to them that when they cut calories, they invariably cut carbohydrate so in fact they lost weight because they cut carbs. We give them the what's up because we have Gary Taubes and his scientific book to back us up. How can any of you keep believing that the HCG diet is so different when there is science that says it's not? Do we need to put Gary on the case of the HCG diet just to make things clear for us all?

The studies say injecting saline is the same as injecting HCG. Well, why don't one of you do just that, inject saline and report back? You'll be doing everything else the same, 500kcals, injecting stuff into yourself every day, believing it's going to work. Oh yeah, you gotta believe because the studies say that it works just the same so if you don't believe that saline works just as well, then you might as well believe that HCG doesn't work either.

This is kind of interesting, about GH secretagogues having an additive effect on fat weight gain (lipogenesis) with insulin.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20219977

Makes me wonder if there's some relationship there where if you have enough GH, the secretagogues don't kick in and stimulate fat gain in a co-conspiracy with insulin.

(Random observation, not vouching for it, just thinking.)

You mean like a negative feedback system? I think more GHRH (GH releasing hormone/peptide) will cause more GH, not less. It's more GH that will cause less GHRH. That's the negative feedback hook. Just like more testosterone will cause less LH. More T3/T4 will cause less TSH. Etc.

In that abstract, it says GHRP-6 causes adiposity. What it doesn't say is that GH itself causes fat tissue to shrink.

>>It's more GH that will cause less GHRH<<

This is what I mean. (I think I'm going to go check out the molecular pathway diagrams for GH now.)

One shot a cycle, stays in the system for 2 weeks.

Makes your boobs huge too.

F

I'll ask again. If low-calorie is secretly low-carb in disguise, and the weight loss only comes about because the carbs have been lowered--then why exactly is low calorie to be excluded from the active weight loss phase? Atkins didn't exclude it from the toolbox, as long as it didn't cause discomfort. Does the diet for maintenance have to be the same as the diet for losing weight? Why the different phases in the Atkins diet, then? I realize that a zero-carber might not be all that fond of the Atkins ladder--but there are long-term maintainers on this site who swear by it, and for them, the diet they lost weight on isn't quite the diet they maintain on. Maybe closer than a switch from weight loss on very low calorie or low fat to low carb maintenance--but still, there's a switch.

The thing with the hcg doesn't make a difference studies--those studies generally show that the diet was effective, rather than the hcg itself. They don't show that the hcg protocol won't work for weight loss, they just throw into question the mechanisms involved. Again, maintenance might be a seperate question.

If a low-calorie diet is secretly low-carb--that goes double for a very low calorie diet.



Thing is, maybe we do. We can't assume that a 1500 calorie diet is the same as a 500 calorie a day diet, but less extreme. Eating 3000 calories one day, no calories the next (IF) isn't the same as eating 1500 calories every day. And, eating 500 calories for a month isn't the same as eating a 500 calorie deficit (or trying to) for four months (assuming that's how long it will take to make the calorie deficit equivalent).

hcg doesn't make any pretenses of making you lose *more* scale weight. It's purported to: 1) Make you lose more *fat* weight versus muscle 2) Control your hunger 3) Make it possible to reset at a lower set-point 4) Make sure the fat you lose is from abnormal fat stores, not normal, structural ones.

Google Simeons' Pounds and Inches for his theories and techniques.

I'm sorry, I can't go on back and forth like this. I got the studies on my side, you got "theories and techniques" on yours. I mean, you're telling me the studies don't exist, they're not true, their conclusions are wrong, we can ignore all of them, look at this instead. If you want to believe in spite of the studies, well don't let me stop you.

I didn't say semi-starvation should be excluded as valid method. This thread is about lipodystrophy and its causes and probable solutions and that's all I've been talking about since the first post. Not losing fat, not maintaining the loss, just lipodystrophy. What I've been saying about low cal, low carb or any kind of diet is that they are incapable of changing homeostasis back to where it once was.

How can we kill the surplus fat cells just with diet alone?

I don't think there's a hard and fast answer for a lot of things weight-loss related. I ascribe - after significant experience with the mainstream approaches - to the philosophy that a lot of weight control is hormonal or "other" that science does not yet have a handle on at all. (Body's incredibly complex, doesn't lend itself all that well to reductionism.)

BUT, just for anecdotal value, I can tell you that decades ago when I was a teen, I lost about half the significant excess weight that I had on quite low-carb not counting calories (not that I stuffed myself). At about the halfway point I hit a lengthy plateau and switched to a low-calorie diet. If I recall, I barely lost anything on 1,000 calories a day, lost more - slowly over months - on 750 a day and stalled on that, eventually - after listening to all the calorie math about how I must lose on that amount or quite a bit higher - having to cut back to 500 a day (with some exercise) to lose down to "ideal" weight for my height and age. It was that or continue being the fat kid back in the day when it was assumed if you were not thin you must be stuffing your face with Oreos.

I would maintain on 750, and gained when I tried to inch it up, for a long time.

On the non-low-carb portion of my weight loss, I was eating very, very low-fat, lots of greens and raw nonstarchy veggies, and things like tuna in water or chicken breast, skim milk and light cottage cheese. It still usually wasn't what you'd call a lot of carbs but was higher than before. During this phase my cholesterol shot up - it had been fine before.

Eventually I was eating 1,000-1,200 calories and maintaining slightly above ideal weight, with exercise. Over the years weight crept back even at 1,200 to 1,400 a day with exercise. And occasionally the scale would just go up 4 pounds or so at a time and stay there.

To get at your question: During the low-calorie phase of my initial diet, I was eating higher carbs than when I was on low-carb, on which I'd stalled. But I kept having to cut back to lose anything, and my weight would go up at the drop of a hat - it had been more stable on low-carb.